Dealing with Application-specific Knowledge in Context-Aware Systems

Context-aware applications provide users with information and services, personalized according to the user's context. They are supported by context-aware systems that gather sensor data and build context representations. Then applications use context to adapt their behaviors. But performing adaptation in context-aware systems offers advantages to fulfill the vision of a pervasive computing environment, where users interact with various context-aware applications. It ensures the privacy of user data stored in a central user model that is used to serve several applications. However, adaptation differs for different applications and is governed by application-specific knowledge. This knowledge must be communicated to the systems. In this paper, we present three types of knowledge 1) the description of the application behaviors 2) the context elements, describing the context information relevant for adapting the application and 3) the adaptation knowledge required to infer the adaptation. Also we present examples of the three templates, considering an application we developed, the Call Profile Manager.